The Drama of Food
Hello Ian and everyone else,
Sorry for taking a while to get to this. I’m offering up here just a few general thoughts, to follow on from those so far posted. One of the things that that I find compelling and daunting about a topic like food is the range of connections and interconnections one could potentially make. And for this chapter we have just 6,000 words, so space and scope are limited.
I like the idea of using Crang and Wylie’s papers as ways to help shape what we discuss and might eventually write. The suggestion emerging from Heike’s reading of Wylie’s paper about food and performance is interesting. This could offer the chapter a point of focus. Here are a couple of food references that might be useful/worth considering at this stage.
Belasco, W. (2008) Food: The Key Concept. Berg, New York.
This book could provide a potentially useful starting point for our chapter. Belasco’s basic argument is that we decide what to eat based on a negotiation between identity and convenience, with lesser consideration for a third variable in his “culinary triangle of contradictions”, responsibility (p. 8). He has a chapter on the ‘drama of food’ and uses examples from theatre, films, song writing and the visual arts, as well as more conventional data sources, to reveal conflicts over our sense of identity. In this case, performance-related examples are used to show divided identities, but real world examples show how food retail and consumption is a performance (consider stallholders at retail markets, for example).
Jackson, P. (2010) Food stories: consumption in an age of anxiety. Cultural Geographies, 17, 2, 147-165.
This paper would seem to be an obvious reference point for an entry about food in a Cultural Geography compendium. Jackson’s interest in the paper – prompted by food scares and farming crises that we are all very familiar with – is the concept of consumer anxiety and moral economies of food. The paper presents life history evidence to examine food anxieties. It argues that consumer anxieties about food often involve a process of Othering; that the moral dimension of contemporary food anxieties is significant; that life history is an interesting method to examine and access personal anxieties about food and individual feelings about food; and “that food…has enormous revelatory value both in terms of its potential to carry messages about identity and meaning but also to reveal structural dynamics of society and the operation of specific relations of power” (p. 161). It should offer us some context and elements we might even want to challenge.
Okay. Not sure how revelatory this post is, but hopefully it offers a few points to help shape the chapter.
Best wishes,
Damian
Cultural geographies: food blog 
Thanks Damian, your mention of Belasco’s culinary triangle of contradictions and your mention of the need for chapter scope have got me thinking about the current focus of food research in geography and directions research could move in (admittedly not just Cult. Geog). Recently I’ve been reading and writing in response to De Lind’s piece ‘Are local food and the local food movement taking us where we want to go…? (2010) which typifies three seeming fixations in food scholarship: the locavare emphasis; the Wallmart emphasis and the Pollan emphasis. Arguably as per the local food movement, food scholarship is seemingly fixated on consumers and consumption habits. Like DeLind I am somewhat troubled by this ‘i-ness’ fixation. Why are we so concerned with consumers and not to the same extent with community members and matters of collective necessity and collective responsibility (DeLind 2010)? This might be something to discuss or debate? Are we doing the ‘right work’ as DeLind puts it? No doubt there may be many right/useful ways to do food research – what might they be? Arguably food scholarship has moved passed simply unpacking food binaries such as alternative/conventional and global/local…perhaps we are at a crossroads of sorts pondering how to research very complex webs of food production, consumption, exchange and surplus generation and re-distribution. There are certainly moves to consider ‘possible food economies’ outside of global agribusiness driven production-consumption and different politics around food choices that are civics and community orientated (Holloway et al. 2007). Jenny Cameron’s work on growing the community of community gardens and diverse food economies in Newcastle, Australia (see http://www.communityeconomies.org) is a good example of the research-as-performative mode following our previous discussion.
Honing in on Damian’s reference to Belasco – which I confess I haven’t read yet -and consumer negotiations between (1) identity (2) convenience and (3) responsibility makes me think of the culinary triangle as a space for ethical decision making. How individuals and groups work up their own food ethics typically involves negotiation of ‘i-ness’ and ‘civic we-ness’ concerns (see DeLind for more on civic we-ness). For example a communal gardener in the Philippines negotiates the need for household income and the responsibility to supply food to a school feeding program aimed at reducing malnutrition, each time they harvest vegetables from their plots (see Hill forthcoming for more on this kind of ethical negotiation). One way forward is to reflect these complex negotiations and to challenge the seeming i-ness fixations in food scholarship rather than highlight them. I am thinking we have the potential to cultivate new food futures through research. What might new scripts for the ‘Drama of Food’ entail?
DeLind, L. B., 2010. Are local food and the local food movement taking us where we want to go? Or are we hitching our wagons to the wrong stars? Agriculture and Human Values, doi: 10.1007/s10460-010-9263-0.
Hill, A. Forthcoming 2011. A helping hand and many green thumbs: Local government, citizens and the growth of a community-based food economy, Local Environment.
Holloway, L., et al., 2007. Possible Food Economies: a Methodological Framework for Exploring Food Production-Consumption Relationships. Sociologia Ruralis, 47, 1-19.
mannhill
January 24, 2011 at 6:00 am
This is really interesting Ann. ‘New scripts for the drama of food’! Damian – can you respond?
Ian Cook et al
November 23, 2011 at 5:26 pm
Hello Ann,
Thanks for this response to my earlier post; you raise some very interesting points here. Here’s a very quick follow up from me:
Belasco’s ‘drama of food’ phrase struck a cord with me as a link to the performance ideas referenced in other posts on the blog. Looking back at that section of Belasco’s book it is very much intended in the ‘i-ness’ spirit of consumption; i.e. food is an expressive form telling us “who we are”. Your point about ‘civic we-ness’ is therefore a good one and certainly an element that has received less attention in local food scholarship. Although, I must confess, I would be less concerned about the ‘i-ness’ fixation, including in relation to local food studies. I still think there is a good deal of ‘i-ness’ work to be done in food studies generally and local food specifically. Some of the most significant ‘new food scripts’ concern the symbolic and material value of (local) food in the context of emerging debates about food security, new productivism and austerity. Where does cultural geographies of food and performance perspectives fit in this new food drama? These are questions that probably extend well beyond the borders of a 6,000 word chapter…
Thanks again for your response.
Damian Maye
December 2, 2011 at 3:41 pm
Do you think we could discuss enough material here for there to be a ‘diverse economies’ section of the chapter. This would make for an interesting, contrasting section… I’ll have a re-read of the Crang and Wylie papers, but maybe this is an alternative reaiding of the ‘performative’ argument…
Ian Cook et al
November 24, 2011 at 10:44 am
Hi Ian et al,
I’m sure this could work as a contrasting section. In what sense would it be an alternative reading of the ‘performative’ argument? We would need to clarify that.
Damian Maye
December 2, 2011 at 3:52 pm
Hi again,
Some recent supply chain work about food and its moral economic and material geographies (e.g. Jackson et al., 2009) could be drawn in? Some of the ideas in Goodman et al (2010) might also be helpful?
Cheers.
Damian Maye
December 2, 2011 at 4:32 pm
Hi Damian
I’m having trouble keeping all of the bits of these arguments together in my head, as they’re popping up all over the place… a ‘many headed hydra’…
Based on discussions so far, I’m thinking of a) geographers’ work with/as artists, etc. (lots of discussion so far) and b) ‘diverse economies’ work (which Mary is bringing to the blog).
These may overlap a great deal, but there might be some useful contrasts and connections to tease out in the chapter.
I’m just printing out Gibson-Graham, J.K. (2008) Diverse economies: performative practices for ‘other worlds. Progress in human geography 3295), p.613-632 and will probably add something on these arguments later…
Could you say a bit more about the two papers you mention? Under this umbrella or another one?!
Thanks
Ian
Ian Cook et al
December 5, 2011 at 12:21 pm